About Me

Tuesday, 3 March 2015

Thirty Years Later We Are All The Losers

It seems a Long
March from Arthur Scargill's Barnsley to President Putin's Moscow over thirty
years on paths that are neither mapped nor clear but they exist. It is a problem with MEN in the meaning of
money, energy and nationalism.

Today, 3rd March
is marked for some as the day the National Union of Miners ended the Miner's
Strike of 1984-5 which still provokes controversy and dispute. As someone who was there and involved from
day one I can reiterate that it was not the Conservative Government and Mrs.
Thatcher that won, it was the miner's leaders who lost it.

We forget that
only months before the Prime Minister and government had been blooded by the
Falklands Campaign. The needs of this
together with some of the men around the Prime Minister with substantial
military experience meant that in the Cabinet and among other senior ministers
and officials there was a core who knew something about waging wars, including
class wars.

So there was
an understanding of the essence of strategy, tactics, logistics and above all
intelligence and related analysis in the government which was totally absent in
the NUM and its leadership. They went on
strike, wholly unprepared, to trigger a class war without the faintest idea of
what it would entail in reality.

They truly
believed that the arm waving rhetoric, verbal and other aggression, propaganda
antics and endless media photo opportunities would lead to the masses rising
from their TV watching and football, shedding their credit card debts and
overdrafts and marching past the clubs and pubs to glory and the left wing
vision of a socialist paradise, once the various factions had agreed what that
might be.

One of my
stranger experiences was a meeting presided over by the Yorkshireman, Rodney
Bickerstaffe; still with us and demonstrating, held to urge public sector union
officials and sympathisers to ensure they stood, if not four square, then at
least three square behind the miners. As
well as the predictable purple prose we had the usual stunts including the
message from the front, a group of canteen workers who had proclaimed their
loyalty and devotion to Comrade Arthur.

It is possible
to go on and on and on about the crassness and bungling of the NUM. What I can say was that if the NUM had
elected the real man to do the job of President, Mick McGahey, see Wikipedia,
it would have been very different. A
while after it was all over, I came across him in a bar and we shared a few
brandies and wondered what an uncertain future might bring.

We did not imagine
that very soon the Communist empire of Eastern Europe would collapse and a
different world emerge. My own view at
the time was that western capitalism was here to stay for some time and the
communist nations were in no shape to compete or to overcome it. Then as now there was the reluctance to
understand and accept the rapidity of technological and economic change in so
many sectors.

Why are we now
all the losers? The first casualty of
war is said to be the truth. The truth
was that in the early 1980's because of the fudging and politics of the
previous thirty years there was no feasible energy policy for the future. The miner's strike simply added to the confusion
and pushed people into positions that they were reluctant to move from.

One factor was
that among the miners there was the fractures on the union side, leaving
Scargill to control what was left of the NUM.
What was needed was a change of leadership there that might allow some
real negotiation and this did not happen.
This pushed the Prime Minister in the direction of the oil men, the
financiers and other vested interests in related sectors.

It meant it
became impossible then to formulate a coherent energy policy for the long
term. After Mrs. Thatcher left, John
Major dillied and dallied letting in Blair and Brown. They patched. prodded and proclaimed this and
that but let the EU, the major companies and noisy groups of others force us
into systems that not only leave us vulnerable but at huge expense.

This has
continued under the Coalition and the coming election, so far as energy and all
its implications go, we have the choice between the mad and the bad. Either way we lose.

And now we are
all looking to Moscow and wondering what President Putin might or might not
do. But it is likely he will do
something and none of us will like it.

On the
memorial above is the name of the father of my father-in-law, orphaned while
still in the cradle.

2 comments:

Scargill's "we're going to bring down this Tory guv'mint" was hugely damaging to the miners' case.The man was a total idiot who didn't understand what he had taken on....the arrogance of previous easy "victories".